Will Python Overtake Java?

Is Java dying? Of course not. But Python continues to grow in popularity year over year. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses, and both are worth knowing.

According to IT programming trends, Java is currently more popular than any other programming language in terms of number of jobs, number of existing Java developers, and overall usage statics in IT. According to the latest usage statistics posted on a popular technology survey site, Java is being used by 3.0% websites as a server-side programming language, whereas only 0.2% of websites use Python. However, all the recent reports have highlighted that the usage and popularity of Python is growing drastically compared to Java, where usage is coming down year on year.

At myTectra, we have been monitoring the trend of Python and Java since 2013 based on the number of Jobs posted in Naurki for the Bangalore region since 2013. In the below table, we can see that Java requirements are coming down year over year, whereas Python requirement has grown from 200 in 2014 to 6500+ in 2017.

Language

2014 April

2015 April

2016 April

2017 April

Java Job Postings

17000+

17000+

15000+

12000+

Python Job Postings

200+

500+

3500+

6500+

These job posting statistics from Indeed shows python is the only programming language consistently growing, compared to Java, which is going down drastically.

So it becomes essential for programmers to understand some of the major differences between these two popular programming languages.

Understanding Important Differences Between Java and Python

Both Java and Python are general purpose programming languages. While the former is a statically typed language wherein programmers have to declare all variable names explicitly, the latter is a dynamically typed language where developers are not required to declare variable names explicitly.

Java requires developers to write longer lines of code to accomplish common programming tasks. They also have to put in additional time and effort to organize, maintain, and update a Java codebase. On the other hand, the syntax of Python enables developers to express concepts without writing longer lines of code. It further emphasizes reusable and readable code generation. Thus, it becomes easier for programmers to maintain and update codebases. Both languages have been updated on a regular basis. Programmers can use Java 8 to avail themselves of a number of new features, including lambda expressions, a new date/time API, and a new functional interface. Even better, they can switch from version 7 to version 8 of the programming language without any hassle. But developers often find it daunting to choose between Python 2.x and Python 3.x. Both versions are being maintained in parallel and hence switching from Python 2.x to Python 3.x is found to be challenging.

Java makes it easier for programmers to create portable cross-platform applications. These applications can run on any device on which the JVM is running. On the other hand, developers have to use a Python compiler to convert code written in Python into code understandable by the specific operating system. As the JVM is installed on many devices, developers can run Java applications on various devices without requiring any specialized tools and compilers.

The performance and speed of the two programming languages differ. Many programmers have proved that Java is faster than Python. While it cannot be used to accomplish CPU-intensive tasks, developers often have at their disposal a number of options to enhance the execution speed of Python. They have to replace Python’s default runtime with CPython, PyPy, or Cython to increase execution speed significantly. On the other hand, the performance of a Java application can be easily optimized without using any additional tools.

Along with being a popular web technology, Java is also used widely for developing apps for world’s most popular mobile operating systems, i.e., Android. The Android SDK includes a number of standard Java libraries. Developers can easily create Android apps by taking advantage of networking, data structure, graphics, and math libraries. They can even use a number of tools and frameworks to speed up Android app development. But those into Python development know that it cannot be used for mobile app development directly and exclusively. Developers have to use additional frameworks and tools to use it for mobile app development. Many programmers prefer developing mobile apps with Java to save both time and effort.

The reason for Python becoming more popular and the huge surge in the number of users year over year is because Python is becoming a language of choice for all the current trending technologies in IT. Python was adopted as a language of choice for almost all the domains in IT including web development, cloud computing (AWS, OpenStack, VMware, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, etc.. ), infrastructure automation, software testing, mobile testing, Big Data and Hadoop, data science, etc. If the current trend continues, Python will become the most sought after language and overtake the number of jobs requiring its knowledge in the next two or three years.